E-signature

E-Signatures for M&A Documents

Send NDAs, engagement letters, offers and any other PDF or Word document for signature from the deal. Route it to signers, approvers and viewers in sequence or in parallel, check identity by email or SMS code, chase automatically, and file the executed copy with its certificate back on the deal. Recipients need no account.

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  • £399/month
  • Unlimited users and deals
  • TrueValue Agent included
  • No credit card required

Why signature belongs on the deal

E-signature software for M&A sends transaction documents to the parties for electronic signature and records who signed what, when, and with what identity check. Standalone e-signature services do this well; what they cannot do is know which deal the NDA belongs to, gate a data room on it, or file the executed copy where the diligence and the offer already are.

On a deal the signature is rarely the end of a process; it is the gate to the next one. An NDA opens a data room. An engagement letter starts a mandate. An offer letter moves a deal into exclusivity. Holding the signature on the deal is what lets those things happen without a person copying a PDF from one system to another and remembering to update a stage.

How an envelope works

  1. Step 1

    Prepare

    Generate the document from the deal or upload any PDF or Word file. Place signing blocks — signature, initials, name, title, company, date, text, checkbox, number, email, dropdown, radio, calculated and attachment fields — assigned per signer, with validation rules, defaults, locked values and conditional visibility.

  2. Step 2

    Route

    Add signers, approvers who hold the document until they clear it, viewers and CCs. Choose sequential or parallel signing, an identity check per recipient — link, email code, SMS code or a sender-shared access code — and a reminder cadence and expiry.

  3. Step 3

    Sign

    Each recipient gets a tokenised link to a public signing page: no account, no app. Whether they may act is decided by the server, never recomputed in the browser, so a page left open overnight cannot disagree with the record.

  4. Step 4

    Complete and file

    On completion the executed PDF and a certificate of completion are archived on the deal, immutable, and the sender and CCs receive the executed copy. Every status change is written to the envelope's event trail by the database.

Managing an envelope in flight

  • Delivery, not just sent

    Each recipient's delivery status is what the mail provider reported. A bounce notifies the sender and is never retried; a hand-off failure on our side is retried with a cap.

  • Reminders and expiry

    Automatic reminders on the cadence you set, a manual chase from the tracking page that shares the same counters, and real expiry that moves the envelope on and tells the sender.

  • Correct, don't void

    Change who a link is for, reorder unsettled recipients or move unfilled blocks without voiding the envelope. Settled signatures are untouchable, and every correction is a before/after event.

  • Templates

    Save a document's signing layout — the file, the roles and where each signs — and reuse it on the next deal.

  • Scheduled sends

    Prepare now, release at a set time, with the same approver gate as an immediate send.

  • Deal activity

    Send, view, sign, decline, complete and correct are written to the deal's activity feed and notify the team.

    M&A deal management software

The record

The legal record of a signature is the stored signature itself, with the content it was given over, the signer's identity check, the IP and time, and the certificate of completion that lists them all. TrueValue keeps that record immutable once filed: the fingerprint and the certificate cannot be changed by any writer, downloads are signed links to the filed bytes rather than a re-render, and the public verification page recomputes a signature's hash from its stored content. The audit trail is written by database triggers on every status change, so no route into the table can skip it.

Where a PDF sealing certificate is configured, executed PDFs carry an embedded cryptographic seal; where it is not, they are archived unsealed and the record says so. We state which applies rather than implying the stronger one.

Frequently asked questions

Do recipients need a TrueValue account?

No. Each recipient receives a tokenised link to a public signing page and signs there. The token is the credential.

Can I sign documents TrueValue did not generate?

Yes. Upload any PDF or Word document, place the signing blocks and send. Uploaded pages render in the browser and are stamped with the signatures on completion.

What identity checks are available?

Per recipient: the emailed link alone, a one-time code by email, a one-time code by SMS, or an access code you share separately. SMS codes require SMS to be configured on the workspace.

Is there an audit trail?

Yes. Every status change on an envelope is written to its event trail by a database trigger, every recipient action is recorded, and the certificate of completion is generated from those records.

Can an envelope be corrected after sending?

Yes, without voiding it: reassign unsettled recipients, reorder them, move unfilled blocks. Signed positions are frozen and every change is recorded as a before/after event.

Is it legally binding in the UK?

Electronic signatures are recognised in English law for most commercial documents, including NDAs, engagement letters and share purchase agreements. Certain documents — deeds requiring witnessing, some land transactions — carry additional formalities. TrueValue records the evidence a court would expect; take legal advice on the formalities for a specific document.

Go deeper

Send an NDA from the deal

Generate it, route it and see the executed copy filed back with its certificate.

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